AWS Selected as Preferred Cloud for Robinhood Alternative Food Delivery App
Food delivery app built on AWS helps thousands of small food vendors offering local staples, like tom yam kung and pad thai, to increase their profits
Purple Ventures Co., Ltd developed the Robinhood app in just three months as a corporate social responsibility initiative of the Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) Group
BANGKOK – May 19, 2021 – Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced that the maker of the alternative food delivery app, “Robinhood,” has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider to increase agility, innovation, and efficiency. The Robinhood app has leveraged the breadth and depth of AWS’s unmatched portfolio of cloud services, including containers, database, compute, and machine learning, to support thousands of restaurants, drivers, and customers in Bangkok since its launch in October 2020. The mobile app, built in just three months, is the first in Thailand that does not levy application or gross profit fees on small food vendors, a sector that is struggling financially during the COVID-19 pandemic. When a customer places an order for delivery with the Robinhood app, Robinhood pays the vendor the full price of the meal, helping 80,500 food vendors and 13,000 delivery riders across the capital earn more.
In Thailand, food delivery apps typically charge restaurants a fee of 30-35% of each order, making it difficult for most small street food vendors to make a profit. As part of Siam Commercial Bank’s (SCB) Corporate Social Responsibility initiative, SCB Group stepped in to help street food stalls increase online deliveries and profits using the cloud. The Robinhood app was developed by Purple Ventures Co., Ltd, a subsidiary of SCB 10X under the SCB Group, using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which gives the company the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes container applications in the cloud. For example, readily-available merchant, customer, rider, and transaction services were integrated as the container building blocks of Robinhood, which reduced app development time and cost. Robinhood also uses Amazon Aurora MySQL, a relational database built for the cloud, to process up to 3,000 food orders per minute. Using AWS Batch, Robinhood easily and efficiently runs hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs in the cloud, which improves customer experience by quickly processing user requests. For example, Robinhood can transfer funds between customers, riders, and restaurants in under an hour, process refunds instantly, and recommend vendors who are located closest to the customers to reduce meal delivery times by up to 50%. In addition, using Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service to build, train and deploy machine learning models, Robinhood delivers personalized restaurant recommendations to over 926,000 customers to help them quickly find the food they like.
“Robinhood is an invaluable umbrella helping thousands of small Thai food businesses that have experienced unprecedented difficulties during the pandemic. By developing Robinhood as a food delivery app that food stall owners can leverage, Purple Ventures is helping food stall vendors, which would normally rely on foot traffic, continue to sell during the pandemic, when customers are ordering meals online rather than walking to food stalls. By not levying application or gross profit fees, Purple Ventures is making it affordable for food stall vendors to list their meal options on the app,” said Srihanath Lamsam, Managing Director, Purple Ventures. “AWS enables us to scale our technology infrastructure as we grow, which supports our plans to onboard more delivery riders and restaurants in Bangkok and to expand to other cities to support even more small food vendors across the country.”
“AWS is pleased to have helped the team quickly create its Robinhood app, which uses cloud technology to expand opportunities for street food stalls in Thailand,” said Conor McNamara, Managing Director, AWS ASEAN. “By leveraging AWS’s portfolio of cloud services to develop innovative new offerings, Purple Ventures is helping tens of thousands of food stalls grow their customer base through Robinhood.”
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